Google Not Showing Localized Pages Within Country For .COM TLDs

There appears to be this bug lingering around since August 2006 that I did not fully look into today. A site that is hosted outside of the US, let's say, in the UK or Australia, with .com TLDs, are indexed in Google.com but are not in the index for Google.co.uk or Google.com.au, respectively.

A WebmasterWorld thread has been reporting sporadic issues of this since August and it has sprung up again around New Years. I travelled over to a recent Google Groups thread to get more evidence and examples.

The site http://www.awkspcrepairs.com/ is hosted in the UK (confirmed via traceroute). A site command search on the domain name in Google.com brings back the home page result (screen capture. A site command search on the domain name in Google.co.uk brings back the home page results (screen shot). But a site command search on the domain name in Google.co.uk with pages from the UK only does not return the index page of the site (screen shot).

That seems to be the issue. An other example was emailed to me by Nikhil, who told me to try a search on Telstra at Google.com.au and you will see www.telstra.com listed as number one, reportedly a Aussi site. But when you select the pages from Australia option, the main domain does not show up (screen shot).

Forum discussion at Google Groups and at WebmasterWorld.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at January 4, 2007 7:21 AM Comments (11)

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If you look, Telstra is actually appearing at the #3 spot.
Its such a horrible site that it probably just isn't as well optimised as its competition and I can well imagine that people would link to bigpond (telstra's ISP arm) or the WP as 'telstra'.
Certainly my .com hosted-in-australia is appearing in Google.com.au, 'pages from australia'
(You almost made my heart stop!)
I also can't duplicate your awkspcrepairs results. It shows for me.
Is it possible that 'results from uk' don't work quite the same when used from the US? I have always thought the whole area was poorly explained.

Posted by Lea de Groot at January 4, 2007 09:48

Maybe they are fixing it slowly?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at January 4, 2007 10:36

I've been talking to one SEO about this for a while (I won't name him in case he doesn't want that). We were looking at root pages of .com's and why they didn't show up in the "search pages from the UK" search results.

We found and fixed something in early December and the two examples I knew of are working correctly now. My hunch would be that it's a matter of waiting for pages to be re-crawled and re-indexed, but I'll ask to make sure.

Posted by Matt Cutts at January 4, 2007 12:48

Thanks for the update Matt!

Posted by Barry Schwartz at January 4, 2007 12:59

You should better check allocated country blocks using a GEO IP or IP to Country database rather than Traceroute and reverse lookups.

Posted by Ken Neil at February 1, 2007 06:58

Any update to this?

Posted by rich at February 21, 2007 19:02

Should be fixed

Posted by Barry Schwartz at February 21, 2007 19:07

Hi,

The same problem is occuring for our site on google.

Over the last six months visitors from us and canada have decreased drastically. There is marginal increase in visitors from Europe and Asia.

In fact, our site comes on top for visual basic in google.co.in and around 250 or so in google.com. While i am ok with this, is this in anyway connected to the fact that we are having fewer visitors from us. Is google categorizing our site more as a site related to .in (local).

Scares me.

How do we tell google to treat us as a worldwide site ? Even though we rank low...

Posted by kris at April 24, 2007 10:14

Gday - I have a site www.bonzabuy.com that has the same issue... If people search for me with google with the 'only pages from au' checked my site doesn't show at all.
I'm also paying for AdSense which makes no sense to me right now because of this!!
I have now purchased bonzabuy.com.au & am thinking of moving the whole store to try to make sure I come up in Au results...
Any help / ideas would be appreciated!

Posted by Adam at April 30, 2007 03:18

We switched our website to http://www.bonzabuy.com.au and now we appear in Australian searches - couldn't get the .com site listed so started over!

Posted by Adam Keegan at January 16, 2008 03:15

Same here, we switched to http://www.thebargainavenue.com.au from .com and now it lists well..I still dont know how to get the .com domain listed if you choose pages from australia

Posted by kev at December 17, 2008 19:33

Google Not Showing Localized Pages Within Country For .COM TLDs

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